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How to Defend Earth From Asteroids

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Apocalypse Now
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« on: December 23, 2012, 04:00:16 pm »

Cause       Expected Deaths Per Year
Shark attacks       3-7
Asteroids       91
Firearms accidents       2,500
Earthquakes       36,000
Climate Change       150,000
Malaria       1,000,000
Traffic accidents       1,200,000
Air pollution       2,000,000
HIV/AIDS       2,100,000
Tobacco       5,000,000


Asteroids and climate change are the only two threats in the table that can have abrupt and global consequences, and to which everyone on the planet is exposed, regardless of their lifestyle or personal behavior. In principle, they are both preventable. In both cases mitigation would require international agreements and cooperation. But would such collaboration even be possible if a threatening asteroid were discovered, or would we be bogged down in the same kind of denial and obstruction that has prevented action on climate change?

Evidence from Greenland ice cores and other paleoclimate data show that spontaneous and extreme climate changes take place much more frequently than large impacts and on time scales that can exceed human adaptive capacities. Asteroid impacts are rare events, but abrupt climate changes are common by comparison. Only 13,000 years ago, the North American megabeasts -- including woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant sloths -- also had a very bad day. Well, at least a bad millennium. It was so bad that some scientists have mistakenly attributed that mass extinction to a 2 ½ mile-wide comet explosion. That idea has also been debunked by many scientists, including -- you guessed it -- David Morrison.

Fortunately, there are only around 30 undiscovered asteroids larger than a mile in diameter. The probability of impact by one of these before the end of the century is 0.0005 percent. On the other hand, recent research suggests a 2 percent probability of global catastrophe from anthropogenic climate change by the end of this century. It is reasonable to suggest that a human-caused climate catastrophe is at least 40,000 times more probable than an asteroid catastrophe. And for anyone who has looked at the temperature records for this year, we can't say we haven't been warmed!

The scary lesson of the North American megabeast extinction is that it doesn't take a giant impact to create a bad day. The Earth is susceptible to catastrophic climate changes that can be triggered by much smaller events. We are now in the process of disrupting the Earth's energy balance with a speed and magnitude that only the largest impacts have achieved in the past. It would be the ultimate irony if we developed the technology to defend our planet from asteroids, but not from our own behavior. And if we don't do something about it soon, we are in for a very bad century.
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